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Terminator Genesis – 3

Now that we have a computer that has enough sense to keep “awake” as much as possible, to immediately sense new devices as soon as they’re attached to it and immediately activate them, to start crying louder & louder as soon as it loses power supply and also to keep a record of all its “experiences”, we now need to teach it how to understand that input and learn from those experiences.

At this point, the computer will be said to have acquired FIRST ORDER INTELLIGENCE. This is for future reference.

I’ve already presented an apology for our need to re-define AI. “Artificial intelligence” is a misnomer and has misled scientists as well as investors because computers obviously lack no intelligence, do they?

What a computer can do in a matter of seconds, we humans can’t do in our life time. For example, Google Search can mine billions of webpages in milliseconds and find that one page which contains the search term “moonlabs terminator”, for example.

Isn’t that impressive? Who can contend with that giant?

Or you can use an Excel sheet and fill a column with 1000 random numbers and then use the SUM function or even multiply all those 1000 numbers together and any computer will compute the results in seconds.

Scientists are divided on whom to call the Father of Modern Mathematic. I tell my students Archimedes was the good father of modern mathematics because he said “Mathematics is a science from heaven”.

That’s a great insight.

“Mathematics” is a Greek word that means “to learn” so God has given us the ability to learn and put us in a world that is the largest school & longest movie script running continuously since some 6000 years.

The local Greeks had translated my Father’s kingdom, “Eden”, into “school”. They were wise and made a true translation. It later transmuted into current Skopje but that’s another story.

The other “gentiles” were not as wise so they say “What’s in a name?” I don’t know why they don’t care.

I am a mathematician and a philosopher and I love wisdom. I don’t like misleading names like Artificial Intelligence. But I’m still going to use it because it has stuck since decades and there is no alternative in English that will convey what we’re trying to develop. “Artificial Cognition” comes close but is not good enough so let’s continue the traditional name.

Dumb computers are quite fine.

We find dealing with image and sound the easiest, dealing with words harder and dealing with numbers the hardest so we built machines that are number crunchers.

Hence, writing programs that deal with numbers is the easiest. Programming for words & letters is a little harder and programming for images and sound is the hardest.

We and computers are opposites (and complimentary). It’s good to have a villain!

But now we need to build a computer that can understand images and sound like us.

For that, we need to teach computers the art of mathematics (building definitions).

If a computer can construct definitions, then it can understand.

I’ll show you examples to prove this crucial assertion in the next post. Till then…